Saturday, March 22, 2014 11:08:10 AMthe "wolf/Deer" analogy is fun and all, but generally wrong. The apex predator doesn't lead the collapse, it's another population that is wiped out by a bad winter or a rampant disease. The author wants that mental image of the rich predatory wolves wiping out the poor, defenseless deer. It's a ploy for the uneducated.

Friday, March 21, 2014 1:59:24 PMare among the top 10% on earth. If we have $109 each, we have more than the Zimbabwean finance ministry reported that they had in 2013, they only had $217 in their treasury. Real poverty exists, but creating waste in our markets, I just don't believe it helps the situation. I totally take your point though.

My family has just got here, so I need to go but I promise I will respond to any of your questions. I don't know all the answers but I can tell you what my textbooks tell me.

Before I go I just want to say you have made a real impact on me with your temperament, it's a real testament to your intelligence and character, I will remember you for it, kudos.

Friday, March 21, 2014 1:28:46 PM@Musuko42: Ok I'm running out of time but I'll try to answer you I'll be back to this post later so check in with it if I stop.

When I use the word "artificial" it is meant to describe an outside force taking control of the market to force it in a way that it does not intend to go "naturally" or at the point of equilibrium where supply and demand meet.

I take your point about they spend more on charity. But the point of a market is not charity it is running a market to the maximum efficiency. Charity is more of a individual choice, although at least in America we offer tax incentives to make the rich contribute to charity. That is often why we are the most charitable, although we like to attribute it to our character, it's how our tax laws are written.

Yet the same could be said about you and I. We both are far richer than most people in this world. We

If our goal is to end hunger then we need to look at who is hungry and how we can get the largest number of people fed. This issue has to do with politics, not wealth redistribution, we produce enough food to feed the world. How do we get the food to people, with out killing their incentive, or simply helping the governments that are starving them.

Friday, March 21, 2014 11:34:01 AM...people would also feel it in things like their ira accounts, housing prices, mortgage and interest rates on their loans just to name a few effects.

I can understand that you feel that they have too much. But there's not a finite amount of money in the world, so them being rich does not mean someone else has to be poor. The "top 1%" are making the vast bulk of their money in the stock market. When Twitter went online people made billions in seconds flat. In the stock market, you can double your money in less than two years if you know what your doing. Not everyone can buy multiple $500 stocks or know how to invest, so the wealthy very often get wealthier at a faster rate. You and I are making them vastly wealthier just by using google or twitter.

And just if you're interested (NUGT) and (DUST), they are two low cost stocks that feed off each other. When one goes up the other goes down, you can make a decent amount of money on them right now.

Friday, March 21, 2014 10:59:08 AMThe super rich can enter and break these cartels if they have the resources to enter the market and wish to compete or by funding new technologies that compete with monopolies or cartels. One example I can think of is George Westinghouse who helped Tesla prevail over Edison and J.P. Morgan. Tesla tried suggesting his idea to Edison but Edison refused him. If Tesla had not got the funding he needed in sufficient amounts from Westinghouse, it's possible we'd only have DC power today and never even known Tesla even existed.

Plus there are more common reasons, the rich are major investors in our companies. If you attempt to control their wealth they will simply move elsewhere with their money, as France realized. If America did the same thing companies would move out of America, the rich would move out or relocate their money to more favorable markets, unemployment would increase, the stock market would definitely be majorly negatively affected, and middle-class

Friday, March 21, 2014 10:12:00 AMNow i agree OPEC is a problem, it's a global cartel. So it is crazy hard to stop them and, in addition, all the ways you'd stop a monopoly or cartel result in major economic harm to people. With the small exception that one party decides to suddenly stop and start competing again instead of colluding with its peers. Yet Game theory tells us that this would likely only result in short term gains and is not a overall long term strategy for the individual company. And to be fair, this is one of the problems that capitalism does not adequately address until new efficient technology is created.

Yet it is a problem in with industrialization in general, there are some things you would just need gigantic amounts of money to enter into. This are called natural monopolies, things like oil companies, electric companies, airline companies, etc. You'd need to be a billionaire just to enter into the market and this is where your rich people enter into.

Friday, March 21, 2014 9:48:20 AM...sided economists. You also have other inefficiencies as corruption is elevated as people steal gas from each other or horde gas for later.

When we have no price ceiling and the prices of gas fluctuate depending on the gas station, you're willing to pass over one in favor of one thats a few cents cheaper. Or perhaps you're util value is greater if your able to save time because you're late for work and so you go to the higher priced gas station. This is how markets should work at equilibrium.

Friday, March 21, 2014 9:36:05 AMYet this comes at a cost, because the market is being artificially manipulated by forces other than simply the supply and demand, it creates inefficiencies in how goods are valued and traded.

As small amount of waste is fine, infact it is inevitable. Yet because governments are often in charge of manipulating the market, very often politics becomes the main goal not market regularity. This can be a mammoth block to efficiency and can create some pretty horrible scenarios.

I'm sure you've seen your fill of graphs showing this effect so how about some examples. In the 70's the government enacted what is known as a "price ceiling" for gas. The idea was that the price of gas would not rise beyond a certain level and thereby always allowing people to have cheap gas. Although because prices were not at equilibrium the local gas station had to sell the gas to who ever got their first. This resulted in huge shortages and long lines, just as was predicted by supply s

Friday, March 21, 2014 9:24:42 AM(I'm taking a definition I saw recently, which I understand might not be accurate: a posession is something you have by virtue of being able to defend yourself, whereas property is something that you have by communal agreement on who owns what).

Friday, March 21, 2014 9:22:58 AM"Socialism is a method of artificially spreading out ownership via a governing body of some sort"

But surely capitalism is no less "artificial": the entire concept of exchange of goods and services in a structured way, and also the idea of property (rather than posessions), all seem pretty artificial to me, when you compare with what wild animals get up to.

Friday, March 21, 2014 9:13:39 AM"do you see nothing wrong with how Capitalism works when you introduce humans to the equation? Also do you not see anyway to improve it at all? "

Ok, your issue is more in the weeds. Firstly there have been multiple forms of capitalism not just one. You have Agrarian capitalism, Mercantilism capitalism, Industrial capitalism, Globalization capitalism, Keynesianism, which I mentioned earlier, Neoliberalism capitalism also known as Supply side economics. Socialism has just as many different forms as well. With out going into philosophy of language, I'll just say it's possible to have capitalism and socialism together.

Ok, but here is there point. Socialism is a method of artificially spreading out ownership via a governing body of some sort. It is often done to ease burdens on individuals or consolidating power to the governing body by spreading out effects to a more macro level.

Is it entirely possible that, paradoxically, the only stable long-term economic system is one of constant change?

It certainly seems to be that way with the social element of our civilisation. Societies that are in a constant state of change, like ours, thrive, whereas those that attempt to stay fixed and unchanging, like North Korea and various other totalitarian regimes, struggle and/or fail.

It does make me think about something else: if you were the candy-bar maker, you'd much prefer 100 people with $1 each than 99 people with $0 and 1 person with $100.

The value thing, though. I'd say in a lot of ways the value difference between 0 and 1 is a lot more meaningful than, say, between 49 and 50, if those numbers represent things like, say, food.

A man with 1 "food" is 100% richer than a man with 0 food. Whereas someone with 50 food is only marginally richer than someone with 49. Also, the man with 0 food is starving, whilst everyone with 1 or more is not.

Friday, March 21, 2014 8:50:22 AM@Musuko42: Here is the wiki you asked for on the different forms of Utilitarianism and the mathematical proofs of Utility. It sounds like from what you said earlier...

"We want capitalism to give us the chance to succeed, and we want socialism to catch us if we fail."

...you'd favor Keynesian economics, or "demand side economics," as opposed to Supply sided economics. Keynesian economics has many flaws, I would say to you without going too much detail, it can be just a destructive as laissez-faire capitalism and can put an economy in places it can't recover from if used for too long.

Friday, March 21, 2014 8:41:40 AMCould society and the economy stand if everyone made at least $50,000 a year and Keeping prices the same?

I guess the better question is how do you legislate greed out of Capitalism? I do believe in having too much. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Koch Brothers, all have way too much money. How do you balance that?

Friday, March 21, 2014 8:35:10 AMI do not believe Capitalism is the best we can do. No one should starve, no one should be "poor" Everyone deserves to exploit the same advantages as anyone else. I agree we need to have some sort of reward for doing well but I believe we need to change what we all think the minimum should be. A place to live, food on the table, a means of transportation, the ability to retire comfortably, and guarenteed healthcare. I think everyone deserves this at the very least.

Friday, March 21, 2014 8:35:02 AMOk, now on a macroeconomic scale things start to fall apart, here's the problem. You offer everyone a candybar. But immediately not everyone is at a Util value of 5. Some people don't prefer this candy bar, some hate candy bars, some people like them but they have an allergy and it poses a risk to them, etc. So immediately everyone can't reach the same level of satisfaction, in fact your torturing some people who get sick thinking about candy bars. So the idea, exactly as you had posed, economics attempts to bring the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Now ever since the book "The Leviathan" was written by Hobbs people have been attempting to find the correct mixture of utilitarianism.

This is the well that all modern economic theories derive their source from everything from Communism to Capitalism.

Friday, March 21, 2014 8:32:30 AMin the previous Minimum wage thread this is the issue I have with posters like Andrew, Humanaction, Cajun, Crakrjak and the other clearly right leaning economics thinkers. They think (correct me if I'm being wrong here), that socialist want to kill Capitalism altogether and implement a Socialism style economy. It feels as if their arguments are acting like people in power want to get rid of it altogether. I don't personally believe that's the case at all.

The other thing is (ANdrew15 or HumanAction, if you read this) do you see nothing wrong with how Capitalism works when you introduce humans to the equation? Also do you not see anyway to improve it at all? The reason I ask this is we as a species keep getting better, do you think Capitalism is the best economy we can ever develop?